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Chapter Three

As prisons go, Las Colinas is not unpleasant, at least from the outside. There are no coils of razor wire, no guard towers. There are no kennels of baying hounds waiting to track some hard-eyed woman in unflattering horizontal stripes through thickets and ravines. There are no thickets and ravines. Las Colinas is smack in the middle of a suburban San Diego community called Santee. The town is home to feed stores and barbecue restaurants where country and western bands play on weekends. And while my professional interests had skirted the field of penology, it wasn’t difficult to draw a few conclusions about the prison from what I already knew.

Women are fond of enclosed spaces. A by-now-infamous study suggested that while boys are prone to build towers with toy blocks, girls build elaborate enclosures, giving special attention to the decoration and security of entrances. Indeed, a classic Renaissance motif symbolizing the Mother of God was a walled garden. And Las Colinas, while scarcely meeting the aesthetic requirements of the term “garden,” looked to me less like a prison than a typical Southern California elementary school. Several single-story buildings, painted an institutional tan, clustered about a chain-linked central open area in which I could see a couple of picnic tables.

The few truly dangerous women confined here would be in some special, high-security area, I guessed. But the preponderance of the women prisoners could be safely contained with minimal provisions for security. They would display here the same impoverished identities that had led them to the prostitution, drug dealing, or accessory status to a boyfriend’s crime that had captured the attention of the police in the first place.

A very small statistical minority, the female criminal takes up less than five percent of the nation’s cell space and almost none of its razor wire. With certain exceptions such as the rare sociopath and those with untreated psychiatric problems, women offenders are not difficult to control. Even as children female humans easily comprehend the larger social consequences of theft, battery, and murder, and as adults rarely engage in these activities. Those who do, know themselves to be compromised in a much more devastating sense than their male counterparts. The fall is different, farther, and has broken them long before they wind up in prison. As I completed my “Visitor’s Request to See Prisoner” card I contemplated methodologies for learning the truth about the sequence of events that had landed Muffin Crandall in this sad and sterile place. Even then I suspected that the task might be over my head.

“Sit in there at phone ten,” a blonde woman directed from the prison reception area. She wore a badge saying “Corrections Trainee,” and was tucking a stray tail of her tan shirt into olive green wool-blend slacks that made me think of Boy Scout uniforms. I noticed that she carried a walkie-talkie but no sidearm, and looked as if she’d just arrived from a Junior League recruiting tea. That aura of cheerful wealth and privilege.

It seemed odd that she’d seek employment as a prison guard. I decided that she must be doing undercover research for some liberal foundation that would later publish a report decrying the poor prenatal care given pregnant prisoners or something. The fantasy explanation restored my sense of social congruence, as we social psych types are prone to say. It forced something puzzling to make sense.

“Your client’s in B Unit, so it’ll take a while,” she explained, smiling. “More security there. You know.”

I nodded, wondering in what sense Muffin Crandall was my “client” and why she needed more security. There had been nothing in the portion of paperwork I’d had time to read to suggest that in prison Crandall would do anything more dangerous than weave potholders out of cut-up socks. There had been no indication of prior criminal activity, not even a traffic ticket. So far, Muffin Crandall’s profile was an epic of law-abiding conformity so devoid of suspicious behavior that I should immediately have been suspicious. Nobody who drives can go ten years without so much as a parking ticket unless there’s a very good reason. Not wanting to come to the attention of police, for example. Unfortunately, this obvious concept had not yet crossed my mind.

The room with the phones was just off the reception area and a monument to sensory deprivation. Just a long, blah-colored room with a wall down the middle. In the wall were nineteen numbered plexiglass windows with phones on each side. Mismatched plastic chairs were fastened to the floor in rows facing the windows from both sides.

When the door to the reception area clicked shut behind me I felt something constrict in my chest. Walled gardens notwithstanding, I knew then why I’ve been so scrupulous about not robbing convenience stores at gunpoint. The reality that someone else was empowered to unlock or not to unlock that door tightened my ribs like a vise against my lungs. There wasn’t a single picture on the wall, not even a months-old copy of Good Housekeeping to read. When a woman in blue pants and a blue shirt with “San Diego Jail” stenciled over the pocket was brought to the chair across from mine twenty minutes later, the hair on my neck was slick with sweat and I knocked the phone off its ledge when I grabbed for it.

“Christ in the foothills!” she rumbled in a gravelly voice. “You look like warmed-over swan shit. Don’t tell me you’ve never been inside a prison before.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you,” I said too loudly into the phone. “My name’s Blue McCarron. Your brother thinks you’re innocent.”

The eyes watching me from behind bifocals in expensive alloy frames were the same dark blue as Dan Crandall’s. Unlike Dan’s, however, these eyes were circled with thick coverup that couldn’t cover enough. Muffin Crandall looked twenty years older than I’d expected. The flesh over her facial bones seemed unable to support its own weight and hung in folds. Yellowish skin tones suggested a fading tan that had once been deep. Perched above her ears was a synthetic auburn wig, permanently set in tubular rows. I could see the cheesecloth wig cap between each auburn tube. The cap wasn’t particularly clean. Wisps of dull gray hair jutted stiffly from its perimeter. Muffin Crandall looked like a poster for a very noir version of Annie.

“My brother doesn’t know his ass from the Holy Grail,” she growled. “And I don’t care who you are or what he’s paying you to do, it won’t work. I have a lawyer who’ll say I’m insane. That may work. I probably am insane. Nobody sane freezes people like stew meat.”

She lowered pale orange lids over her brother’s eyes and half smiled, revealing perfect teeth behind lipstick in a shade worn by peroxided exotic dancers in Germany at the beginning of the Cold War. A particularly ghastly purplish red. I knew this because I’d read an illustrated history of Barbie dolls and their origins in Teutonic pornography, not that the information was of any merit in deciphering Muffin Crandall. Then she opened her mouth again.

“Let’s just say I’ve ‘eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner,’” she pronounced in rolling tones. I could see the tones vibrating in the plexiglass window between us.

And that’s what did it. The line was from Shakespeare, I was sure. Probably Macbeth. And Muffin Crandall was acting. The wig, the grotesque makeup, the tough talk. All an act. I remembered that she’d had something to do with a civic theater.

“Great voice, but you can cut the act now,” I said. “Your brother’s not paying me to critique a performance.”

“Cut the act?” she answered, a real smile animating the folds of her face. “If all the world’s a stage, where do we go when we’re not acting?”

In that moment, in an airless room built to obstruct all but the most superficial human interaction, I became Muffin Crandall’s friend. I liked her. I recognized in her a kindred spirit, a person whose grip on the truly important questions remained unweakened by minor tribulations like dirty wigs and prison. Behind me the grid snapped and sizzled, leaving a scent of ozone in the air. It meant I was supposed to be there.

“We only have ten or fifteen minutes,” I told her. “How did you get the prison authorities to let you keep that wig?”

“I told them it holds my brains in and that without it I forget where I’m supposed to go to the bathroom. Fear-of-potty is the great American phobia, you know.”

“I know; I’m a social psychologist. But why do you want to wear a dirty Shirley Temple wig?”

“Because it holds my brains in and without it I forget . . .”

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “Why are you called ‘Muffin’?”

“I thought it sounded better with ‘Crandall’ than ‘Cupcake.’” She sighed, managing to suggest that the decision had been a difficult one. I could feel the minutes ticking by inside my watch as I got nowhere.

“You’re not used to interviewing people, are you?” she asked after a long silence.

“No,” I answered. “Usually I just interview data.”

“What have you learned?”

“Oh, you know,” I hedged, wondering what gem of social science might push her off balance, “stuff about the effect of annual rainfall on Iowa voting patterns, ethnic demography among jockeys, profiles of murders committed by women, the usual.”

“And?”

“And there are a lot more black and Latino jockeys than you’d think.”

Muffin Crandall laughed. Actually it was a rumbling guffaw that made her eyes twinkle but seemed to tire her.

“So my brother wants you to say that the murder I committed five years ago isn’t like the typical profile for murders committed by women five years ago? What is the typical profile?”

“Well—” I sighed as if reciting something everybody already knew, “for starters the victims of female murderers are typically husbands/boyfriends, or children, or least often strangers killed in the commission of felonies orchestrated by husbands/boyfriends.”

“No lone women defending themselves from attacks by strangers?”

“Doesn’t happen,” I stated with authority because, in actuality, it rarely happens.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“Because women are by nature passive and silly,” I lied, expecting to be struck by lightning. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, we assume a sweet smile will defuse danger. We’re simpering wimps. We don’t defend ourselves.”

Through Muffin’s telephone I could hear a radio on the guard’s desk on her side of the plexiglass wall. An oldies station. I could swear the station was playing “In the Still of the Night,” and in the music I imagined an army led by Eden Snow bearing down on me, shouting the names of a million women who fought bravely to the death. Misha would be in that army. I would be in that army despite the calculated stupidity of my most recent words. I had said them because I needed to know whether Muffin Crandall would be in that army.

Her sallow cheeks bloomed a dull cranberry color as she cocked her head and bellowed, “You fucking idiot! Get out of here!”

Muffin’s outburst caused the guard to stand and scowl near her desk, but I had won.

Women tend to fall into three categories when exposed to de­meaning remarks about women: those who start throwing the furniture around, those whose upper incisors draw blood as they bite their lower lips but say nothing, and those who seem not to have heard. Muffin Crandall’s response was diminished only by the fact that all available furniture was bolted to the floor. And I had learned more about her than she wanted me to know.

“If you’d actually killed that man, you’d never admit it,” I said as she stood to leave. “If you’d really killed him there would have been a good reason. You would have covered your tracks. You would not have stashed the body in a public freezer for five years. It’s too stupid, and you’re not stupid. Your story doesn’t work.”

I stood when she did so I could measure her against myself for height. I’m five six, and she was at least an inch and a half taller. Big-boned, although her hands weren’t as overlarge as her brother’s. She had a competent, self-assured posture even in prison denims. I concluded that Muffin probably could have killed a stranger in her garage five years ago, but that she probably didn’t. Or if she did, the story she now told to account for her actions was not the truth. Not even remotely.

Slowly she sat down again and picked up her phone. I copied each move, my gaze locked on those dark blue retinas.

“Kid,” she pronounced, “why don’t you just go back to predicting the number of cow pies in Arkansas after a lunar eclipse? Stop wasting my brother’s money. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that makes you an epic pain in the ass, capisce?”

“Capisce,” I agreed. At thirty-five it’s nice being called “kid.” “And you’re right,” I went on. “I don’t know what I’m doing and only accepted Dan’s offer because I’ve recently decided to make lots of money. God only knows why. There’s nothing I want to buy. Nevertheless, I know enough to have concluded that your story about the body in the Roadrunner freezer isn’t true. I have no idea what to do next.”

“Jesus,” Muffin Crandall said. It was not a prayer.

“Probably I’ll prepare a report. On legal-sized paper, no staples.”

“That will be nice,” she murmured sweetly. “Then you can give it to your psychiatrist, who will know what to do.”

The guard had looked at her watch and was moving toward Muffin.

“You’ve given me an idea,” I said. “Very helpful.”

“That was not my intent,” Muffin Crandall mentioned over a sagging shoulder as she was led away.

The door to the reception area was opened by the same chipper guard-in-training who’d locked me in. She continued to strike me as a debutante who’d accidentally wandered into a Marine boot camp, again tucking her tan shirt into those ugly uniform pants. The tucking created a sense of déjà vu that made me question whether I’d actually talked to Muffin yet at all. The presence of another woman in the visiting area lobby confirmed the passage of time. I was sure she hadn’t been there when I arrived. And I would have noticed.

I would have noticed because of the basket. She was an older woman with white curls framing a carefully made-up face. She wore a pastel blue shirtwaist dress accented by a flowered scarf used as a belt. And she carried a large basket lined with blue and white checked napkins. There was a blue ribbon on the basket’s handle. Nestled within the napkins was a mound of cookies. They filled the prison lobby with a mouthwatering scent that immediately derailed my train of thought, whatever it had been. All that remained were two words—“chocolate chip.” My trains of thought are easily derailed by any olfactory experience of chocolate chip cookies.

“Mrs. Tewalt,” the guard said politely, “we’ve explained to you and your friends several times that you may not bring gifts to a prisoner. We cannot take these cookies to Mrs. Crandall as we could not take her the sandwiches, cake, and jug of lemonade you brought two days ago. You can bring her white socks and underwear, shoes that cost less than fifty dollars, and personal toiletries from the approved list. Would you like another copy of that list?”

“Oh, no, dear,” the woman said. “But why don’t I just leave these cookies for you and the other ladies who’re looking after our Muffin. I assure you they’re freshly baked and not one of them has a file in it!”

“This sort of work must be very hard for you,” she said to the guard as an afterthought, a sympathetic frown wrinkling her peaches-and-cream brow.

The debutante guard caved in. Anyone would.

“Here, have a cookie,” she said to me after accepting a basket any American over twenty could immediately recognize as Red Riding Hood’s.

“Um, I’ll just take an extra one for my dog,” I agreed. “She’s out in my car.”

“In the parking lot,” I added as if there were some chance I’d left my car in a tree. Militaristic uniforms, even on toll booth operators and debutantes, cause me to attempt truly concise levels of explanation. I don’t know why.

The woman named Tewalt gasped. “In your car! Oh dear, it’s so hot out there. You know, leaving an animal in a closed car can be—”

“It’s actually a truck with a camper shell,” I explained, heading for the door with the Tewalt woman in fluttering pursuit. “And it isn’t closed. The back is open, it’s parked in shade, Brontë has water and a battery-powered fan covered in mesh screening so she can’t stick her nose in it, and did I hear you say you brought these cookies for Muffin Crandall? I just saw her.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Tewalt said. “Are you with the police?”

“I’m a social psychologist. Mrs. Crandall’s brother, Dan, has asked for my help.”

As we reached the door the blonde guard called, “Please, Mrs. Tewalt, don’t bother coming again except during official visiting hours, and please no more food.”

“Of course, dear.” The reply was not sincere.

“I’m Helen Tewalt, an old friend of Muffin’s,” she told me in the parking lot, averting her eyes to the ground for her second remark. “This has been terribly upsetting for her friends, you know. We’re all afraid it could happen to us.”

“You’re all afraid you’ll kill somebody and then store the body in a freezer?” I blurted.

“The, well . . . mental situation is what I meant,” she said softly. “Muffin just fell apart after Deck died. That was her husband, you know. She never got over it, started doing such odd things. Now we’re afraid it’s Alzheimer’s or something like that. If only we’d seen the signs long ago.”

Her sigh joined the warm breeze blowing eucalyptus leaves across the paved parking lot. I could see Brontë’s sleek head eagerly tracking my progress toward the camper. No doubt she’d already picked up the scent of the remaining chocolate chip cookie in my hand.

“What odd things did Muffin do?” I asked casually.

“Well, just lots of things, for heaven’s sake. Keeping that food locker in the desert like Deck did when he was alive. We told her it was silly, but she wanted to keep everything just the way it was. She didn’t even clean out his closet for months, just kept his clothes there instead of donating them to charity. That’s the thing, you know, just donate to charity and try to get on with your life. That’s what we do. But Muffin wouldn’t let go. We should have seen there was a mental problem.”

I should have seen that Helen Tewalt had just told me absolutely nothing, but I wasn’t used to real people with their charming duplicity. Numbers, graphs, hard data—these I can deal with. Real people are so sweet and complicated that I’m almost always mesmerized by them. I forget to stand back and check to see if what they’re telling me meshes with the big picture. Later I would realize that Helen Tewalt actually meshed way too well.

“Here’s my card,” I told her. “Would you mind if I called you at some point? There are so many things about this case that I can’t quite grasp.”

“Of course, dear.” She smiled. “I’m in the book. In Rancho Almas. H. Tewalt. Any of Muffin’s friends will be happy to talk to the psychologist who’s trying to analyze this awful thing. Just call anytime.”

“I’m not a clinical psychologist and I don’t analyze . . .” I began. But Helen Tewalt had veered off toward a cream-colored Buick, popping open the door lock with the remote control on her key chain. She merely waved as she slipped inside and started the engine.

“Why do I feel as if I’ve just walked through the set for a Martha Stewart special?” I asked Brontë when I got to the camper and gave the command that she could run free. The cookie held more interest for her than my question. But I knew somebody else I could ask, even though I’d have to wait until seven that night when Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro cleared its hardwood floor for line-dancing lessons. I’d be there. I had a lot of questions.